Evidence for the RNA world is looking a bit muddier (Image: Frans Lanting/Getty)
WITHIN every living cell lurks a relic from the earliest stages of life on Earth, like a flint spear point in a modern military arsenal. Its discovery is overturning our understanding of how we came to be – and could signal the end of the favoured explanation of the origin of life, “RNA world”.
Life has a chicken-and-egg problem: enzymes are needed to make nucleic acids – the genetic material – but to build them you need the genetic information contained in nucleic acids. So most researchers…
